Richard Lindner

Richard Lindner was born on November 11, 1901, in Hamburg, Germany, to Julius (Jüdell) Lindner and Mina Lindner (nee Bornstein). He began formal art studies in the summer of 1922 at the Kunstgewerbeschule, the Arts and Crafts School in Nuremberg, and by 1926 had become a "master pupil" there under Professor Max Korner. He also lived in Munich from 1924 to 1927 and began studies at the Kunstakademie there in 1925. No source describes a formal degree; the record consistently uses terms like "studied" and "master pupil."

Lindner eventually settled in New York, where he built a career as a commercial illustrator for magazines including Vogue and Harper's Bazaar before shifting his focus to painting. His first solo exhibition was held in 1954 at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York; he later showed at Cordier & Ekstrom (also referenced as Cordier & Warren) Gallery in New York. He taught graphic expression at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1952 to 1965, became a guest professor at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste in Hamburg in 1965, and moved to Yale University's School of Art and Architecture in 1967. He continued to paint and exhibit through the 1970s, including a retrospective organized by Stephen Prokopoff described in his biography as his last American museum retrospective, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Lindner died on April 16, 1978, at the age of seventy-seven, of a heart attack in his apartment in New York, as documented by his biography and contemporaneous press coverage, including the New York Times. He is buried at Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

Lindner's reputation rests on museum recognition rather than auction visibility. The Museum of Modern Art has drawn on its holdings of his prints and illustrated books for group exhibitions in 1984 and 1989, and the Whitney Museum of American Art counts him among its holdings. The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza's own artist entry situates him as a painter trained in Nuremberg and Munich who developed a distinctive, tightly composed figuration built around eroticized, machine-like bodies. No exact, attributable critical quotation could be confirmed from a named critic in a major outlet for this profile, so none is included.

Lindner's auction market is small and inconsistently documented across databases. A Phillips listing records a sale of an untitled work at USD 88,900, though the exact sale date has not been confirmed in available sources. Other market databases report much lower recent figures, including a cited 2025 print sale of USD 820 at a European auction house and a 2016 Heritage Auctions sale of USD 500, both far below the Phillips result. This spread reflects the mix of paintings, illustrated prints, and posters that come to market under Lindner's name; a print or poster and an oil painting by the same artist can sell for wildly different sums. Collectors should treat any single "record price" figure with caution until it is matched to a specific, verifiable lot, medium, and date.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Lindner, and no single gallery or estate currently identifies itself publicly as his exclusive representative; his work instead moves through a mix of dealers, print specialists, and general auction houses. Auction price data for his work is inconsistent across major databases, ranging from a few hundred dollars for prints to tens of thousands of dollars for paintings, and no single all-time auction record could be confirmed with confidence as of this writing. His strongest and most stable signal remains his presence in major museum collections, including MoMA, the Whitney, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza, which anchors his historical standing independent of any single auction result.